ARTWORK: Jasmin Small ARTWORK: Jasmin Small WandaVision introduces the two main protagonists, Wanda and Vision, as they lead an American suburban life. Moving chronologically, the first four episodes are set against a different decade backdrop from the 20th Century. Cleverly,
WandaVision plays on the nostalgia pendulum, giving us a modern spin on old-time classics. The show’s ability to mix together moments of dramatic irony, suspense and horror is a testament to their mastery of tonal shift as achieved by the show’s
My Rocketship Has a Nice Personality Though Alexander Lane
Penises, I feel, are inherently funny. It’s not a maturity thing. It’s the incongruity of something that sticks out of the human body when so much goes in (food, water etc.). However, men with penises: less funny. As you’ve probably realised, I’m conflicted about phallic spaceships. On one hand, they look funny. On the other hand, they’re owned and run by men projecting a masculine ego onto space and its colonisation. There are a number of reasons why we should go to space. Humans are explorers, and it is the next frontier. What we find will broaden our conceptual horizons, challenging how we see ourselves in the wider cosmos. The problems we face will likely require new solutions that can be translated back to solving some of Earth’s problems. But this doesn’t seem to be our focus anymore. It appears we only have two motivations: money and masculinity. The former is well-documented, the latter less so. Western environmental philosophy rests on two tenets: the idea of Mother Nature, and the idea of humans’ (read: mans’) physical domination of Mother Nature. The former is used in mainstream conservationist arguments. The latter is how we actually engage with the natural world: a territory to be beaten back and then harvested. The feminisation of nature is not necessarily a good thing. Just look at the way so much anti-abortion rhetoric frames a woman’s purpose as birthing men and raising them.
Likewise calling nature a “mother” assumes that it exists to care for humanity. Nature does not exist for us. It simply is, just as women simply are. Neither should be tied to anyone else by obligations of care or servitude. But, by destroying nature, we have incurred a debt. Think of it like randomly attacking a stranger, you then owe them some form of atonement. Unfortunately, nature cannot tell us what could make up for centuries of exploitation and pollution. But it is not unreasonable to think we could start by stopping, and then by repairing and restoring it. The space race rejects this. It thinks the solution to our biophysical limitations is not to live within them, but to try and supersede them. It thinks we can solve the scarcity problem by doing exactly what we’ve done to Earth, only on other planets. However, the scarcity problem is an inherent facet of capitalism. Take just one instance: food. A decade ago, it was clear starvation was a distribution issue. In 2009, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation found that we produced enough food to feed ten billion people. But we won’t sell it cheap enough for those earning less than two USD a day, and instead we use it to feed livestock and create biofuel. Every year, one third of the food made for human consumption is wasted. We do not have a scarcity of food; we have a cruel and inhumane distribution of food.
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